


Salon Talk

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Haircuts, In the vault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 14:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10923924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: Miss Giddy has seen girls come and go from the vault. Something's different about this one.





	Salon Talk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tyellas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/gifts).



Giddy threads her crooked fingers through the scissor grips. The scissors' joints—like hers-- are gritty and rusty and they don't move easily. No wonder the girl with her back to Giddy looks like she'd used her head to fight a losing battle with a lawnmower. Giddy's mouth quirks as she runs her free hand through the girl’s hair. "All of it gone?"

Briar's voice is low and tight and deep, as if she's speaking from the bottom of an old dark well. "Yes."

Giddy sighs, fear no longer rabbiting up her spine like it had when she'd first heard the black rage in Briar's voice. Joe had dropped her here like that, full of fury, much too young. Didn't even have tits yet. He'd found her dressed like a warpup rooting around in a scrap heap in the motor pool. He hadn't said how she'd gotten there. That meant he didn’t know, and the oceans would grow back before Joe would ever admit a full-life girl was living freely under his nose for any length of time.

The ancient steel scissors shirr open and closed like a crow's beak as it swallows carrion. Giddy sings softly, more for her own benefit than Briar's, as she cuts her hair.

 _“I fell asleep down by the stream_  
_And there I had the strangest dream._  
_And down by Brennan's glen there grows_  
_The briar and the rose.”_

The punishing sun dumps an avalanche of midday light through the newly-cleaned window-wall, but it doesn’t reach the impluvium yet. Briar’s feet hang over the lip into the water, but they make no ripples. Giddy sits crosslegged behind her, hanks of mousebrown hair drifting into the bowl of her shift stretched between her thin legs. The sharp bones of her bottom grind into the stone, but she'll endure the pain. Briar doesn't usually let anybody, even Giddy, be this close to her for too long. Now, especially, that she's of age. _Of age_. The phrase sours in Giddy's cheeks even though she didn't speak it. Giddy stares at the back of Briar's head, a mess of unevenly-chopped waves and patches of almost-bare scalp. Buried under the attempt at spiting the man who loved to run his fingers through those smooth waves is a killing-sharp mind laid against the whetstone of that man’s hypocrisy. And not fear rises in Giddy then, but a species of bitter, fanged hope.

"Your hair needed cutting anyway," Giddy says conversationally, ruffling her hair and catching whiffs of Briar's unwashed scent. It's sour but not sick: the healthy stink of a teenager.

 _“There's a tree in the forest_  
_And I don't know where._  
_I built a nest out of your hair._  
_And climbing up into the air:_  
_A briar and a rose._

"Turn to your left," Giddy says and steeples her inked fingers on either side of Briar's head. Briar doesn't move.

" _You_ turn. I want my feet in the water," she says, sixty years of defiance in an eighteen-year-old throat.

Giddy is used to sullenness. "I'm old and my bones ache. Turn, Rosebriar."

Stillness prevails, until the impluvium gently sloshes and Briar tucks her feet under her. She does not scoot her bottom into the turn; instead she raises herself up on her hands and swings her body around in one fluid, silent motion. Giddy doesn't think she's ever been that nimble.

Giddy is used to sullenness, used to contrariness, used to petulance in the girls Joe keeps. But Giddy is also used to spines that bend, wills that break, tears that flow on command. What she had feared in Briar at first-- and what now gives her hope-- is deep steel, rigged through her like rebar through concrete. Giddy starts on Briar's hair again. Briar sits straightbacked and motionless in profile, chin jutted defiantly. Her eyelids ride at half mast, but Giddy knows she's as drowsy as a hunting cat. The _shrrk shrrrk shrrk_ of the scissors grows loud and rhythmic in the stillness.

 _“Well I don't know how long it's been,_  
_But I was born in Brennan's glen._  
_And near the end of spring there grows_  
_A briar and a rose.”_

Briar's fallen hair tickles Giddy's feet. She leans over to inspect a scab on Briar's scalp, and catches Briar's green gimlet gaze on her as she straightens. Briar's eyes flick back to forward, and Giddy says nothing. Giddy senses the questions rioting behind her lips. They'd fussed there before and they'd fuss there again. And Briar would either ask or she wouldn't, but Giddy bets that she would, like they all do eventually. And Giddy would tell her stories and feed her wordburgers as she had appetite.

"Turn to the right now," Giddy says, and Briar obeys with another fluid movement, apelike in its power and catlike in its grace.

Giddy wants her to ask. Desperately wants her to ask, ask until her tongue falls from her mouth and leaves that much more room in her skull for the triumphs and sins and science and hatred and blunders and poetry and ignorance that live on Giddy's skin: a cataclysmic contraction of sprawling humanity from the bombs that killed the world to a herd of inkstrokes hurrying across the continent of an old woman's body. Mother Pangea had rolled back over the world after all, like the geologists had said she would, but they would not believe Pangea had saggy tits instead of soaring mountains. They would not believe Pangea, all six and a half stone of her, would have less bulk than a child's skipping-stone pile.

Giddy _needs_ her to ask, because steel is tougher than stone, and sometimes at night when Briar's breathing is deep and even and Joe's is ragged and shallow, Mother Pangea lies awake with billions of footsteps prickling her skin and pittering in her mind, and Mother Pangea is growing old and her sharp peaks are dulling, and soon she must pass her mantle to her daughters.

 _“I picked the rose one early morn._  
_I pricked my finger on a thorn._  
_It had grown so close, its winding woes,_  
_The briar and the rose._

"There," Giddy says, and leans back. "That's all I can do with the scissors. We'll have to--"

Deliberately but not slowly, eyes forward, Briar takes the scissors from Giddy and tucks them into her whites behind her back.

Giddy looks at her hard. "He'll hurt you."

"Not before I hurt him."

 A short, tense silence spins out. _Careful with your furious face, girl, or it’ll stick that way,_ Giddy thinks at Briar. _Then again, you’re going to need that curled lip and that jutted chin if you’re going to stab Joe in the back. You’re going to need a_ lot _more than that._  
  
“Let me tell you a story,” Giddy says, brushing the deadfall of hair from Briar’s bare neck and shoulders, “about how a slave became a leader.

“The slave loathed his station, loathed the king that kept him there, and swore he’d free all the other slaves in the kingdom. But he knew he couldn’t do it alone, nor could he just run up to the king and kill him. So how to enable the meek to inherit the earth?

“One day, the king’s parade traveled through the slave’s town, and people were shouting praise at the king and throwing themselves down in front of the king’s litter in utter devotion. The slave recognized one of his friends facedown in the mud, and was disgusted at his behavior. But then the king commanded his adviser to lift those prostrate people, including the slave’s friend, from the mud and bring them with him.

“Time passed, and the king’s parade returned to the slave’s village. The slave was shocked to recognize his friend, fat and smiling, dressed in the finery of the king’s court, riding in his own sleek car. Then the slave had an idea. As loathe as he was to do it, he threw himself in the mud at the king’s feet, and sure enough, the king commanded his adviser to lift the slave up and reward him for his devotion. The slave was brought to the king’s court and made to swear undying loyalty to the king. He did so, keeping his secret heart hidden, and was given an apartment, food, a job, and every right he had been denied so far in life. The slave did not forget who he was, though, or his purpose.

“More time passed, and he became an exemplary servant to the king, the paragon of dutiful devotion. The king replaced his old adviser with the former slave, who never betrayed a word of his true purpose for many years. But all those years, the former slave worked in secret, building a plan with those who were against the king. When the time came, the former slave found out he _could_ just walk up to the king and kill him, because the king invited him into his private chamber almost every day. The former slave’s plan was put in motion, and though some people died, in the end the uprising was successful and the former slave, with help from his friends, was able to free the slaves and plant the seeds of a fresh start in the kingdom.”

The silence that settles is gravid and deep, and the seed of it lives in Briar. She sits in a cloud of gauzy white wraps with an unbowed back and a proud chest and a haircut that looks like someone had given a toddler too much sugar and a pair of safety scissors. One corner of Giddy’s mouth tips up.

“I’m keeping the scissors,” Briar says.

Giddy nods and prepares to rise. “Figured you would. We don’t have a razor, so your hair won’t get a lot better than this, but I have a pair of smaller scissors in my medical ki--”

“Leave it like this,” Briar says.

Giddy pauses, then sinks back down to the stone. A smile stretches the lines, inked and aged, on Giddy’s face. She chuckles and shakes her head. Amusement and trepidation simmer together just below her heart. “You’re cruising for one hell of a bruising, dearie.”

Briar then turns the full wattage of her fierce emerald eyes on Giddy. Despite the rat’s nest haircut, or perhaps because of it, Giddy sees stone and steel in the not-quite-grown lines of Briar’s skull, sees how the scowl and the snarl will mark her face as she ages, sees that she _will_ age. Briar _will_ survive by keeping her face smooth when it faces Joe and keeping her mind pressed to the grindstone Joe himself had set spinning. Giddy watches Briar read her tattoos, her eyes flicking hungrily over her cheeks, nose, forehead, chin.

 _I tried to tear them both apart._  
_I felt a bullet through my heart._  
_And all dressed up in spring's new clothes:_  
_A briar and a rose._

“Joe doesn’t scare me,” Briar says, sixty years of living and seeing and knowing in an eighteen-year-old throat. She won’t write history on her skin. She won’t need to. Mother Pangea smiles at her daughter again, and sings.

 _“And when I'm buried and in my grave,_  
_Tell me so I may know_  
_Your tears will fall to make love grow._  
_The briar and the rose.”_

Briar smiles back to her, and it is beautiful. “Tell me more stories, Miss Giddy.”

**Author's Note:**

> The song Miss Giddy sings is “The Briar and the Rose” by Tom Waits. I do not own it.


End file.
